Mr. Siksay, if I can say with respect, what I think is regrettable in the Supreme Court's decision...and it was clear for the counsel present, in terms of the court's questions and thought processes, that they really zeroed in on the law of solicitor-client privilege. It has been a hallmark of our Supreme Court and our bench in recent years to affirm how important that privilege is in Canadian law.
At the same time, the Blood Tribe case was about a woman who had been fired from the Blood Tribe department of health and who was looking to get to the bottom of the reasons for her dismissal. She was able to apply to the federal Privacy Commissioner's office to access personal information that her employer held about her, under PIPEDA. It was very much an access issue.
The purpose section in PIPEDA speaks to the fundamental nature of that privacy interest. Usually, if you apply provisions of interpretation guiding the interpretation of quasi-constitutional documents, you would try to give effect to Parliament's dominant purpose and to interpret exemptions like solicitor-client narrowly, but that interpretative approach was completely discarded in favour of solicitor-client privilege.
Is it surprising? Well, who are judges? Judges are former lawyers. What's the average Canadian's perspective on that? I think they would expect that a federal Privacy Commissioner, with a bevy of lawyers like Ms. Stoddart has in her employ, would be equally competent to review a claim of solicitor-client privilege as a Federal Court judge. There's a real risk if that judicial tendency continues. Unless Parliament makes it clear that we want our parliamentary officers doing this work, the Federal Court and other superior courts in Canada are going to be clogged up with those issues. That doesn't seem, to me, terribly effective.